Feeling Fes
Today I've made more use of my senses as maybe in any other day of my life. Seeing delicate mosaics with elegant color combinations in Fes' mosques and medresas, the most colorful market I have ever seen, extending on most of the medina streets, with almonds and dates, live chicken making desperate noises and donkeys carying boxes of Coca Cola, Berber carpets and bags, lettuce and olives, slippers that come from like One Thousand Nights with intricate ornaments and warm colors, white tombs with blue tiles, green mosque roofs, reminding us all that Islam's color is green and surprisingly green hills and white, snowcapped mountains surrounding the medina of Fes.
Hearing the calls from prayer starting from early in the morning, the ondulating tunes of Moroccan music, kids shouting while playing football in the street, vendors adverstising their merchandise, merchants announcing the passing of yet another donkey, the incessant demands for money from what they see as another rich Western tourist, tambourines and cats miawing.
Smelling refined spices, fish being fried, the tanneries that occupy a whole sector of the medina and produce an odour so hard to escape from, dead animals on the mountain I hiked, garbage slowly decomposing, olives, soap, sweat, cinnamon and oranges.
Tasting watery orange juice in the morning and rich mint tea in the afternoon, garlicky fish and the best use of potatoes that anybody can imagine in a spiced samosa kind of thing, chickpeas and lentilles, oranges and almonds, nuga with sesame, and above all, pastilla, the queen of all things I've eaten, a delicious and surprising kind of meat pie covered in cinnamon and sweet spices. And yes, I ate a lot. I totally shocked my Quebecois partner in crime.
Touching woolen covers in the morning, fresh grass on the mountain, bread and fish in the cheap eatery on the way where an old veiled lady that was eating there gave me beans and I gave her and a nearby worker fish, all of us eating with our bare hands, silk and leather, a shining Dacia car standing in the center of the Fes-new city, earth and sunloving cats, so many hands that were shaken, dirty banknotes, a German style keyboard in this Internet cafe...
..............
Fes is something like I have never seen, heard, tasted, smelled, and touched before. It s being transported in time to when donkeys and artisans ruled in walled cities. A kilometer away from this medina, beyond a green field where thousands lay in the meadows, young and unemployed, product of huge birth rates and incessant rural migration, there is the "new town", built in XIIIth century. Quite new... It became in time the Jewish quarter and looks remarkably distinct, its streets wider, its houses all with galeries and balconies, its synagogue with an old man at the door that speaks a language understood by noone, where words like femme, interdit, Shabbat, Muslim, photos, up the stairs, caridad, or caro appear interwoven. Two kilometers away from the walls of the new city, separated by a verdant valley and a rocky slope, there is the "modern city", built during the French protectorate. Reaching there was a total shock, as everything I have seen yet about Morocco, from the decaying and rather disparing Tanger to the sterlized Asilah, poverty stricken towns on the road from Asilah to Meknes, and almost surreal medina in Fes, got to be challenged yet again.
Not only that the architecture changed, to Nimes meets Genoa kind of one, but the people were like from another planet. Youth that looked worlds apart from the ones in the Medina, being almost the same as their Granada counterparts. Pedestrian malls full of men in costumes, hyperelegant women veiled or not , so stylish and assorted, not a single "fake guide", Dacia representatives, sophisticated restaurants, and a central McDonalds...
I had so many feelings today; I got so many offers of everything, from carpets to almonds, and slippers to hotels, but there was one moment that made me freeze for that second. Gerome tried to find directions for a place and went to ask this girl and her grandma- I said no, they are two women, this is not very well seen around here... And he asked, the girl walked by almost with fear in her eyes but silent as nothing was heard or said, and her grandmother gave us a look full of contempt saying something accusing. But the glance on that girl's face, so frozen and frightened, that I cannot take out of my mind.
I played so much today in the bargaining game- the problem is I am enjoying it too much- I play the card of being Romanian every time- either to send away unwanted offers by speaking only Romanian to them or playing the Romania is like Morocco moneywise card every time. I got some good reductions and I have some good stories...
As I was walking peasibly to the northern fort, I feel something, with my paranoid, tram 16 in Bucharest educated abilities. I turn and a man was very close to my back. He looks angrily and asks "What? What?" I walk forward and quickly notice the zipper from my first backpack pocket open. I realize that; from all things, my paper with some addresses was missing. I run, I catch him; he says something about cigarettes, I get angry, I show him the backpack open zipper, there are people around, he takes from his pocket the paper and a marker I had in my pocket and gives it back,still with a annoyed look on his face. I was so angry, and i just shouted looking him in the eyes " Voler??? Et ca.... Honte!! Allah!!! Allah!! Allah!!!" I didn't realize how everybody was looking at this seen, I invoked the God of fairness for one last time and left, realizing later how weird this all was...
Bessalama for now!
Hearing the calls from prayer starting from early in the morning, the ondulating tunes of Moroccan music, kids shouting while playing football in the street, vendors adverstising their merchandise, merchants announcing the passing of yet another donkey, the incessant demands for money from what they see as another rich Western tourist, tambourines and cats miawing.
Smelling refined spices, fish being fried, the tanneries that occupy a whole sector of the medina and produce an odour so hard to escape from, dead animals on the mountain I hiked, garbage slowly decomposing, olives, soap, sweat, cinnamon and oranges.
Tasting watery orange juice in the morning and rich mint tea in the afternoon, garlicky fish and the best use of potatoes that anybody can imagine in a spiced samosa kind of thing, chickpeas and lentilles, oranges and almonds, nuga with sesame, and above all, pastilla, the queen of all things I've eaten, a delicious and surprising kind of meat pie covered in cinnamon and sweet spices. And yes, I ate a lot. I totally shocked my Quebecois partner in crime.
Touching woolen covers in the morning, fresh grass on the mountain, bread and fish in the cheap eatery on the way where an old veiled lady that was eating there gave me beans and I gave her and a nearby worker fish, all of us eating with our bare hands, silk and leather, a shining Dacia car standing in the center of the Fes-new city, earth and sunloving cats, so many hands that were shaken, dirty banknotes, a German style keyboard in this Internet cafe...
..............
Fes is something like I have never seen, heard, tasted, smelled, and touched before. It s being transported in time to when donkeys and artisans ruled in walled cities. A kilometer away from this medina, beyond a green field where thousands lay in the meadows, young and unemployed, product of huge birth rates and incessant rural migration, there is the "new town", built in XIIIth century. Quite new... It became in time the Jewish quarter and looks remarkably distinct, its streets wider, its houses all with galeries and balconies, its synagogue with an old man at the door that speaks a language understood by noone, where words like femme, interdit, Shabbat, Muslim, photos, up the stairs, caridad, or caro appear interwoven. Two kilometers away from the walls of the new city, separated by a verdant valley and a rocky slope, there is the "modern city", built during the French protectorate. Reaching there was a total shock, as everything I have seen yet about Morocco, from the decaying and rather disparing Tanger to the sterlized Asilah, poverty stricken towns on the road from Asilah to Meknes, and almost surreal medina in Fes, got to be challenged yet again.
Not only that the architecture changed, to Nimes meets Genoa kind of one, but the people were like from another planet. Youth that looked worlds apart from the ones in the Medina, being almost the same as their Granada counterparts. Pedestrian malls full of men in costumes, hyperelegant women veiled or not , so stylish and assorted, not a single "fake guide", Dacia representatives, sophisticated restaurants, and a central McDonalds...
I had so many feelings today; I got so many offers of everything, from carpets to almonds, and slippers to hotels, but there was one moment that made me freeze for that second. Gerome tried to find directions for a place and went to ask this girl and her grandma- I said no, they are two women, this is not very well seen around here... And he asked, the girl walked by almost with fear in her eyes but silent as nothing was heard or said, and her grandmother gave us a look full of contempt saying something accusing. But the glance on that girl's face, so frozen and frightened, that I cannot take out of my mind.
I played so much today in the bargaining game- the problem is I am enjoying it too much- I play the card of being Romanian every time- either to send away unwanted offers by speaking only Romanian to them or playing the Romania is like Morocco moneywise card every time. I got some good reductions and I have some good stories...
As I was walking peasibly to the northern fort, I feel something, with my paranoid, tram 16 in Bucharest educated abilities. I turn and a man was very close to my back. He looks angrily and asks "What? What?" I walk forward and quickly notice the zipper from my first backpack pocket open. I realize that; from all things, my paper with some addresses was missing. I run, I catch him; he says something about cigarettes, I get angry, I show him the backpack open zipper, there are people around, he takes from his pocket the paper and a marker I had in my pocket and gives it back,still with a annoyed look on his face. I was so angry, and i just shouted looking him in the eyes " Voler??? Et ca.... Honte!! Allah!!! Allah!! Allah!!!" I didn't realize how everybody was looking at this seen, I invoked the God of fairness for one last time and left, realizing later how weird this all was...
Bessalama for now!
posted by Gruia Badescu at 12:22 PM
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